Thursday, March 7, 2013

Dehradun, March 7As the nation celebrates International Day for Women, twin sisters from the city Tashi and Nungshi, residents of Sinola in Dehradun, are leaving for Nepal tomorrow on an expedition to Mount Everest. The successful completion of the expedition will also make a world record as no twin sisters have scaled the peak together. The twins, who are just 20-year old, will also be the youngest among feminine gender to do so.

The simple efforts of exposing his daughters to the challenges of mountaineering to develop better understanding of the ‘self’, turned out to be the biggest surprise for Col VS Malik , as his twin daughters, one day in 2009 declared aiming to scale Mt Everest. They had then just passed their class twelfth examinations.

Both Nungshi and Tashi did their school education from Guru Nanak Fifth Centenary School, Mussoorie, and stood as avid participants to sports and adventure activities in the school. After passing their class XII examinations, love for mountaineering made them go for Basic Mountaineering Course at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering (NIM), Uttarkashi, which was completed in 2010. They did not stop here and went on to successfully undertaken Advance Mountaineering Course from the NIM in 2011. The two had also successfully undergone training from a professional mountaineering trainer and instructor at the NIM with A Grade. They later also completed basic skiing course at the Indian Institute of Skiing and Mountaineering, Gulmarg, Jammu and Kashmir, and stood overall second collectively in the course thereby obtaining ‘A’ grade. Their biggest achievement came in the form of successfully scaling Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, in Africa, in February 2012 and this inspired them to scale Mount Everest. The expedition to scale the Himalayas formally begins from tomorrow as the twin sisters leave Dehradun for Nepal to take the greatest challenge of their lives in the form of “Mission Twins on Everest 2013”, as the expedition has been identified. “It has been our dream to conquer Mount Everest”, Tashi and Nungshi point out.

Col VS Malik, proud father, is too hopeful of her daughters’ success. “I am very hopeful that Tashi and Nungshi will make Uttarakhand and India proud and will inspire young Indians to exceed their goals”, says Col V S Malik.

Col Ajay Kothiyal, who, some time back, successfully guided the first-ever All-Women Army Mountaineers team to scale Mount Everest, hoped success for the twin sisters. He said the Indian women had always proved their mettle, particulary when it came to adventure and the “Mission Twins on Everest 2013” would add to the glorious list of Indian women success. The two sisters have recently completed Bachelor in Journalism and Mass Communication.